Sorry to be brief, but I’m in a Strange and Foreign Land: Lawrence Lessig’s column in this month’s Wired Magazine is about his attempts to give us a birthday present. I can’t find it online, so I guess you’ll just have to buy one. (Professor, doesn’t your contract with Wired allow you to license your columns Creative Commons?)

UPDATE: The article, called The Same Old Song, is available on Wired Magazine’s website, with a bit of digging.

Sorry, sorry, we know… we’re really swamped over here, so unfortunately we don’t have much to tell you about yesterday’s decision in MGM v. Grokster. We imagine, however, that you probably heard a little bit about it — if you’ve gone anywhere near a computer, radio, TV, or newspaper — so we don’t feel that bad.

We’d like to write up a brief FAQ about the decision, targeted at students — especially since we’ve overheard a lot of misconceptions. If you can give us a hand, please head on over to the draft on our wiki. (If you’ve never used a wiki, see the brief introduction.) We’d also like to gather some links to the reactions, interpretations, and commentary on the decision — please post those on the wiki, as well.

Please keep in mind that the FAQ is aimed at students, not lawyers. Brevity and clarity are virtues here; try to keep speculation to a minimum.

For those who haven’t heard, on Monday the U.S. Supreme Court will issue all of its remaining decisions, according to SCOTUS Blog. Guess what? MGM v. Grokster is one of those remaining decisions, and that means that tomorrow morning we’ll know the results of a case that could decide the future of technological innovation in this country. For more information on the potential significance of the decision, check out the EFF’s Grokster reader’s guide.

Continuing our project to let the orphans find new homes, we bring this news: The U.S. Copyright Office has announced public roundtable discussions on the subject of orphan works. For now, this is what we know:

Washington, D.C.
July 26 and 27

Berkeley, Calif.
Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California - Berkeley
August 2

More information should be available soon. To stay updated, you can subscribe to the Copyright Office’s e-mail newsletter or its RSS feed. They also have an RSS feed specifically for orphan works updates. Here’s their handy guide to RSS, for those not familiar, which also lists all their available RSS feeds.

Needless to say, we want to make sure that everyone has their voice heard in this discussion. If you can, please be sure to attend. Hopefully free culture advocates on both coasts (like the EFF and Public Knowledge) can help to bring the public to these roundtable talks. It’s up to us to keep this issue alive and in the public view.

Coming on the heels of announcing our Defcon engagement, we’ve got another: I’ll have a kiosk at “Copyright 2005: Copyright and You” (“Copyright 2005: Le droit d’auteur et vous”) in Montréal, Québec, Canada on July 3. Attendees to this free event at l’Université du Québec à Montréal will be able to hear a presentation by none other than Richard Stallman, and a panel including Russell McOrmond of digital-copyright.ca and Marcus Bornfreund of Creative Commons Canada. There’ll still be time afterward to check out the outdoor concerts of the Montreal International Jazz Festival.

If that’s not a good Sunday night out, I don’t know what is.

If you’re going, or you’d like to help me with set-up for the event, drop me an email at grbaker@ufl.edu.

FreeCulture.org will be presenting a paper at this year’s DEFCON conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. The presentation, The Revolution Will Not Be Copyrighted: Why You Should Care about Free Culture, will aim to make the case that “culture hacking” is essential to a vibrant and creative environment:

The purpose of this paper is to explain and introduce the free culture movement and organization to the hacker community. We make the case that hackers should not only care about the ideas of free culture in the literal sense in that we seek to protect technological and digital rights, but also in a broader cultural sense. The idea of using and reusing bits of culture (the goal in a free culture) parallels the central tenets of the hacker ethos where manipulation, reuse, and recontextualization are essential. To that end, we’ll show some compelling examples of art and music that we consider to be culture hacking. From reengineered Nintendo cartridges to electronic albums consisting almost totally of samples to an early 20th century modernist Mona Lisa hack, we’ll demonstrate that some of the most innovative and radical cultural works are also the most derivative. We also intend to emphasize the significance of political and social action in order to maintain an environment of innovation and progress. There are highly significant cultural and technological issues that need to be addressed in society and we cannot stand by passively while leaving the control in the hands of the government, corporations, and other entities. In essence, free culture is deeply ingrained in the hacker ideal.

Rumor has it that we’ll also have some cool new FC.o merchandise and will be present at the Thursday night EFF Fundraiser. For futher info and if you’d like to join the FC.o gang, contact defcon at freeculture.org.

Today, Creative Commons wished the Free Culture movement a happy birthday by posting a ‘remix’ of the original happy birthday song, with lyrics sung by the leaders of the ‘free world’. From CC’s press release:

Just over a year ago, April 23, 2004, at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, more than 100 students met to launch the Free Culture Movement.
…
Creative Commons wanted to find an appropriate way to celebrate. So we put together this version of “Happy Birthday,” sung by, we might say, some of the leaders of the free world (The EFF Staff, Mitch Kapor, Dan Gillmor, Brian Behlendorf, Ian Clarke, Jimmy Wales, Brewster Kahle, and Gigi Sohn).

CC needs to pay 8.5 cents per download for royalty fees, so they are collecting donations but all of the extra cash will be donated directly to us. So if you’d liked support Free Culture, drop some money in the box via CC’s paypal link and then download the remixed Happy Birthday track. Check out CC’s site for more information and their download link here.

I’ve been recently been given the charge as Web Team Director for FreeCulture.org, Inc. and I want to do some organizing before moving ahead with a full redesign and implementation of version 2.0 of our website.

I’m going to start cleaning up the current webteam mailing list. I will be posting a message on the listserv asking everyone who is still willing and able to participate in the website end of the organization to respond. I will give everyone one week to respond before clearing out the list. If anyone wants to participate in the new website, please join the list now by sending an email to webteamsters[at]freeculture[dot]org and I will add you manually. This will be the new general contact email address for the webteam as webmaster[at]* accounts are often targets of spam.

Also, I want to organize the web team into groups responsible for different parts of the site. Different groups will have different access levels to the webserver. There will be site-wide password changes. If you have anything on the website that you want to backup, please do so. I will be taking a full site backup in a few days and then going through the site to remove unnecessary sections. A couple of people have tried to install various web software (drupal, civicspace, etc.) which doesn’t need to be there, I’m going to pull them all off but I won’t be deleting anything without checking with a couple of people first.

Regarding what version 2 is going to look like, this information will come as soon as it’s decided. I don’t want to move away from using WordPress or MediaWiki. We are indeed used to it and I think we should continue to use it unless something new comes up that is indeed better. The two ways to proceed would be to either write a new site from scratch that fits all the needs of the organization and incorporates an interface to our existing software solutions or to use Drupal/CivicSpace.

We’re going to print up some T-shirts as a fundraiser. If you have an idea for a design, please draw it up and e-mail it to freedom@freeculture.org.

If you have any comments about what sort of designs you’d like, the color or style of the shirt, or anything similar, feel free to comment on this post.

What sort of licensing should we use for the designs? Should we ask the artist to transfer the copyright to us, or should the artist retain the copyright but grant us license to use their design? Should we use a Creative Commons license? Which? Should we use a non-commercial license, since we intend to sell the shirts as a fundraiser?

Besides T-shirts, what other sort of merchandise would you be interested in, or you think others would be interested in?

(Just to give the discussion some framework: Our initial run of shirts will probably be around 200 of the same design, on American Apparel shirts.)

Google has announced a new Summer of Code project to sponsor students working on open source projects.

They will pay a stipend of $4500 to each student that completes an open source project by the summer’s end. Particpating organizations include Apache, FreeBSD, Internet2, Live Journal, XWiki, and, not surprisingly, Google.

You must be enrolled in or accepted to an accredited institution and applications are due by June 14.

Their rightsholder policy is as follows:

Some organizations will require you to assign copyright to them, but many will allow you to retain copyright. If Google is your sponsoring organization, then the answer is that you keep copyright to your code.

The program is open to students around the world, and needless to say, $4500 is a small fortune in some countries. Student developers unite.